Greetings and Salutations.

About two or three weeks ago, I purchased a book entitled "Alchemy & Mysticism : The Hermetic Cabinet" from my local bookstore.

A lovely little composium of illustrations and brief notations, and I was astonished to find a number of illustrations within that were personally relevant and introspective to my personal symbology...

But here's the conundrum.

I set the book down for a few weeks, and today, upon picking up the same book, I was unable to find the diagrams that had stuck me so deeply and thus inticed me to purchase said book.

Now, oddly enough - where these initial greyscale illustrations and mapping used to be, there is now a wealth of renissance era "biblical" illustrations of demons and devils wreaking havoc on mankind - something I have always had a profound distate for, yet never noticed upon my first through run through of the book.

The aforementioned illustrations of interest are no where to be found.

Now, granted - this is not a large and massive text - in fact, the entire collection runs no more than approximately 191 pages, and every page is an illustration or collection of such.

I am utterly perplexed I cannot find these images, and I have been going through the text page by page for well over two hours now, and still - I cannot find what I seek.

I have run through every possible scenario to explain the images I remember, yet cannot locate.

Has anyone else experienced a phenomena of this sort?

I am not the type of person to buy books lightly, nor am I the type to hallucinate material of this nature.

I am, at the moment, very upset that where there were once very descript, metaphysical illustrations of the universe and mans "place" within it done in a very succint and elevated style, that now there is nothing but these coloring book depictions of demonic influence over mankind.

I'm wondering if I just hapened upon the intial text during a transcendant point, and was thus revealed the original illustrations, and have since "fallen" to a lower intellectual incarnation - hence the "lower nature" of the pictures within.

Thank you for your time and attentions, and any challenges into the state of my mental health will be subsequentially ignored.

Peace and light.

GE.



[edit on 1/12/09 by GENERAL EYES]

I've never had this happen with a book, however, it did bring back a memory of something that happened to me about 12 years ago. One bored afternoon I decided to wander around town, in the little shopping district everyone referred to as "Uptown". Anyway, I wandered into a delightful store that was filled with every classic toy and book that I rmembered from my childhood. I had my son with me and I spent quite a while chatting with the owner and showing my son the different items that were so dear to me. I left happily that day and called quite a few people to tell them about the shop. My stepsister who lives near there was quite surprised because she'd never seen it nor heard of it. About two weeks later her and I tried to go back. I say "tried" because the shop was simply gone. In it's place was a hair salon. I thought maybe ai Had the wrong street, so we walked up and down every street in that little "uptown" area, which spanned about 10 city blocks, and the shop was no where to be found. I cannot explain it to this day.

Again, not quite the same as you mentioned, but similar enough to recall that to the forefront of my mind.

I'm wondering, did you look through the book before you bought it, put it down, and then later decided that you were going to buy it. If so, then you may have just ended up grabbing a different book with a similar title. There is another explanation I could give based off the book I'm currently reading, but as it's kind of out there I figured to try to get through the more likely possibilities first.

A "glitch in the matrix" my friends....plain and simple. What appears to be happening is that y'all are quite sensitive to time shifts.

Re: the drawings in the Alchemy Book...yes, you may have grabbed a similar book, and then again....you may have been shown what you were supposed to see at the time...

Of course, some may think my thoughts somewhat "different"....but then what is reality but manifestations of mind.

"Time" is a tricky little bugger...

~Holly

Eliade's 'Shamanism' is renowned for that.

I swear that book just grows, loses, adds, and switches pages. Eliade was one weird guy.

Demons are quite capable of making that kind of transmutation (material alchemy if you will)....they are playing with you. They can make the whole book disappear if they want to do so, also.

This is actually the other thought I had when I originally replied. I highly suggest people check out Laura Knight-Jadczyk's books regarding this. Interestingly enough, she quotes Eliade a lot in her work.

I've heard a bit about reality shifts over the past couple of months...I'm not an expert in that field, but I think I get the gist of it.

I just find it unsettling that I've spent the better part of my life looking for certain things, only to have them "disappear" whenever these shifts come about.

It really is an annoyance.

can you post some scans of the photos they sound interesting?